I wish it was cheaper, or free, (the student edition is $70) as it seems like an easy way to build a computer interface for a robot, and once i learn it well enough, i'd love to write a tutorial on it, but it might not be worth it since it costs so much.

Sorry, it's a bit of an aside but that always struck me as odd for an open source community style project. Sure anyone can use the code (with a 100MB runtime download) but if you want to develop and redistribute code then there is a $1800 entry barrier.

Any of the common cross platform scripting languages Python, Perl, Ruby or Tcl would seem a more logical choice.

Well, my latest idea is to see if i can create a redistributable that is 'configurable' to a degree. Have a tutorial teaching about NMEA style data sentences, and be able to 'map' different fields to different gauges and graphs.